Were any conservatives actually offended by the Ocasio-Cortez dance video?

John SextonPosted at 5:01 pm on January 7, 2019

Apparently, we’re going all AOC today, but she is making a lot of news so it seems warranted. You may recall that last week some anonymous account posted a clip of Ocasio-Cortez dancing from her days in college. Immediately, several news outlets including the NY Times, GQ, and Newsweek wrote stories saying the right was outrageously outraged by her behavior. But was anyone on the right actually outraged? The Media Research Center pointed out Saturday that stories about the outrage didn’t actually include any examples. From Fox News:

The Times published a story headlined, “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Dancing Video Was Meant as a Smear, but It Backfired.” It doesn’t feature a single example of anyone being offended with the exception of an anonymous Twitter account that first drew attention to the video saying it showed “America’s favorite commie know-it-all acting like the clueless nitwit she is.”…

Conservative strategist Chris Barron told Fox News that the mainstream media is “so desperate to make conservatives look bad that they will invent a controversy when there isn’t one,” with the Ocasio-Cortez video the latest example.

“If you want to look up the very definition of fake news, look no further than the faux controversy over the AOC dancing video. Literally, every single conservative I saw comment on the video said it actually made her more likable, and yet our shameless mainstream media spends days pushing the narrative that conservatives attacked her,” Barron said. “Must be nice being a liberal.”

You can read the NY Times story here. It mentions the original tweet with the video and then immediately transitions to positive reactions from progressives:

Many social media users came to Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s defense, and the video has inspired memes.

Molly Ringwald, one of the stars of “The Breakfast Club,” declared on Twitter that she was “in the club.” Another star of the film, Ally Sheedy, whose dance moves Ms. Ocasio-Cortez imitates in the video, endorsed the tribute. Phoenix, the band whose song plays in the video, sent congratulations.

And Newsweek did the same thing. Their story was titled, “Conservatives mock Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for college dancing video, everyone else thinks it’s adorable.” It offers up the same tweet from an anonymous Twitter user followed by a list of people who disagreed:

One Twitter user, whose handle referenced the QAnon conspiracy theory popular among supporters of President Donald Trump, tweeted the video with the accompanying insult: “Here is “America’s favorite commie know-it-all acting like the clueless nitwit she is…High School video of “Sandy” Ocasio-Cortez.”

It’s fair to say that most people, though, did not share that reaction to a young Ocasio-Cortez exuberant dance.

In addition to these examples, I also saw at least two right-leaning sites, including Reason, which wrote stories chiding the right for attacking AOC’s dancing. But those stories also failed to include evidence that there was widespread unhappiness over the dancing clip. On the contrary, most people on the right either didn’t say anything about it or said they thought it was cute. Here’s a tweet I RT’d this morning from a Federalist writer:

What the over-reaction to this non-story does show is that the left/media is primed to go on the attack against the right for anything negative about their new favorite socialist. Just look at this reaction to one anonymous tweet:

Can anyone on the internet find me a *single* human Republican (not an anonymous bot account) that was offended by AOC dancing.

This should not be hard, right?

This “scandal” was covered in Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, Reuters etc

Until that happens this entire story is basically fake news. The right-wing media didn’t spread this because they hate AOC, the left-wing media spread it because they love her. These days they will take any opportunity to praise her, even if they have to invent the offense to which they are supposedly reacting.